Variant Fund's Requests for Startups: Crypto Projects We’d Like to See in 2024

Variant Fund published its 2024 requests for startups, listing crypto project areas it would like to fund, including payments infrastructure, institutional-grade DeFi, information markets, and onchain reputation systems. The fund's partners and data scientists describe each area, such as Alana Levin's proposal for issuing verifiable subdomains from trusted parties, which could help prove charity legitimacy given that the FTC estimates hundreds of millions are lost in charity fraud each year. Mason Nystrom proposes marketplaces for crypto AI agents, and Derek Walkush points to Uniswap V4 hooks as a new frontier of DeFi mechanism design.